A peek into the archives

I decided that during my tenure with Punkrocks.net I wrote some funny stuff. Don't get me wrong, I wrote some incredibly unfunny stuff as well. In the spirit of living in the past and all that shit, I have decided to post a few things from Punkrocks.net that I got angry emails about. This first one really set a fire under the ass of somebody at Fueled By Ramen, because they proceeded to email me about how much of a dick I was. I was poking fun at tribute albums because 9 times out of 10 they are completely worthless, so here we go.

Tribute albums are the latest craze these days, which is why Fueled By Ramen has decided to stay on top of the competetion. In March 2005 the label will be releasing Hold On Loosely A Tribute To 38 Special. The label is facing a rather small problem though. Nobody seems to know any other 38 Special song other than Hold On Loosely which is why a decision was made to include 14 seperate covers of Hold On Loosely.

The label has proved over the past 2 years that they can sell just about anything to this new crop of youngsters exposed to indie music, which is why the redunant tendencies they have shown when signing watered down pop act, after pop act, after pop act, have spilled over into the ideas surrounding this tribute album.

Bands for this tribute album haven't been picked yet, but inside sources have told me The Academy Is will be on it, as well as 13 other bands that sound just like The Academy Is.

The label has also comissioned Peter Wentz from Fallout Boy to write a book about the guitar player of 38 Special entitled The Life And Times of Don Barnes. In reality the book doesn't offer any insight into the life of Don Barnes. Instead, it is pretty much 300 pages of cliche "scene" imagery and lots of Chuck Palahniuk worshipping.

Dickety??? Highly Dubious!

After taking my daily run through Pastepunk I just had to comment on something.

The long-awaited INKED IN BLOOD album Sometimes We Are Beautiful is on its way and heralding the band's most recent and most ambitious effort to date is the song "Angel Of Lost Hopes" now playing on myspace.com/inkedinblood. Says Trump of the new album “We were really inspired by FURTHER SEEMS FOREVER for much of the songwriting on this record.” The hooks are founded on addictive melodies and sing-able choruses; in fact the entire album is rooted firmly in the tradition of ‘evolving hardcore’ where the energy, intelligence and beauty of a band’s sound reflect the current state of the scene. According to Trump “from the sound of Sometimes We Are Beautiful we are entering the next level of impacting others with heavy music.”

Press releases usually make me laugh but this one in particular has a high level of LOL-itude. What I'm doing is in no way original because Pastepunk's very own Jordan Baker already elaborated on this earlier, but something occured to me that I just had to share. This press release comes via the fine people at Facedown Records who for all intents and purposes have a zero percent track record of putting out material that is listenable (aside from one Comeback Kid album). The claims they are making about how Inked In Blood are pioneers in some kind of "nu" level of hardcore evolution is downright nauseating. I recognize that most independent labels are in the business of hyperbole but this is a label that has no business making these kinds of claims and after listening to this band you'll know what I am talking about.

There has only been one hardcore band in history to make a lofty claim of this nature and actually have the talent to back it up. You may have heard of these guys.

What makes you think this Darryl Strawberry character is better than you?

As a Red Sox fan I know better than to complain about the media coverage my beloved team gets but after seeing the lack of coverage ESPN gave last nights game, something just didn't seem right. Kason Gabbard pitched a complete game shutout yesterday and there wasn't even a clip of it on the online highlight reel. There are two things that make this a much bigger deal than The Yankees "a team who is only two games over 500" winning their game last night, which was featured as the top baseball highlight.

1. Kason Gabbard is an unknown call up from AAA who has been pitching while Curt Schilling has been on the DL for the 999th time in his career.

2. It's a fucking complete game shutout.

Anyone following baseball these days should know that complete games and shutouts are pretty rare. More reliance on the "bullpen" has made the both of them pretty rare as well as the overall lack of pitching ability that has been prevalant over the past ten years in major league baseball. I will admit that the pitching this year has yielded some of the best performances in recent memory, however, most pitchers don't get to pitch more than six innings if they're lucky these days.

I know that The Red Sox get coverage to the point that it makes other baseball fans sick to their stomachs and unfortunately that is an aspect of the sports media I have no control over. I just wish they would cover the important shit going on with my team and when they aren't, they should be covering all the other important shit that doesn't have to do with either The Red Sox or The Yankees. This was an important event that got largely ignored simply because it wasn't about David Ortiz saying something silly in broken english, and that's just total bullshit.

Disco Stu should have Disco Ducked!

Generally I take the good people over at Pitchfork with a grain of salt, but not today. While I'm way too young to remember the short lived, and highly unnecessary "disco era" of our fine country I know enough about it to know how super lame it was. Pitchfork staff writer Stephen M. Deusner (probably pronounced dooze-nur, though I'm sure he tells people that the D is silent just to be pretentious) thinks otherwise about the disco-era and he discusses this in his review for The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Apparently it was just re-released, which was why the review ran in the first place. If this guy likes disco, that is ultimately his problem, but one of the main themes throughout his review is the idea that Saturday Night Fever turned disco from an edgy, underground kind of music, into a watered down, cheesy shadow of it's former self.

First of all, when the fuck has disco ever been edgy music???? Seriously???? Think about the musicians making music before disco even became semi-popular. I think it is safe to say that people like Jimi Hendrix and bands like The Beatles were way more edgy in their time than disco ever was. If anything, 70's dance music was a more mainstream, clean-cut "guilded" reaction to the dreary rock n roll scene that was evolving into something not as family friendly. Sure, when disco reached the heigth of its popularity it was largely associated with doing huge lines of blow off peoples cocks and shit like that but much of the music itself was still pretty friendly. If disco from the early 70's is what this reviewer considers to be be "edgy" then his homelife growing up was probably the spitting image of how Ned Flanders and his family are portrayed on The Simpsons only with more church and a few frontal lobotomys.

Lets compare two Bee Gee's songs, one from 1975 which was before Saturday Night Fever was released, and one from 1977 which is the year Saturday Night Fever was released. I'm going to compare the lyrical content, because if the "pre-Saturday Night Fever disco-era" was supposedly "edgy" then I'm sure Barry Gibb and company were expressing some really outlandish disco style thoughts.

The Bee Gee's "Jive Talkin" 1975
Its just your jive talkin
Youre telling me lies, yeah
Jive talkin
You wear a disguise
Jive talkin
So misunderstood, yeah
Jive talkin
You really no good

The Bee Gee's "Night Fever" 1977 Post Saturday Night Fever Era
And that sweet city woman,
She moves through the light,
Controlling my mind and my soul.
When you reach out for me
Yeah, and the feelin is bright,

Then I get night fever, night fever.
We know how to do it.
Gimme that night fever, night fever.
We know how to show it.

Ya, thats some captivating shit right there. They both sound pretty banal to me, though I'm sure the first song was somehow a metaphor criticizing The Nixon Administration's foreign policy tactics. Did the reviewer of this album even stop to think about how disco is pretty much a drop in the bucket on the musical timeline? Disco was super popular for about 3 WHOLE YEARS, not because people got tired of it, but because they realized how fucking lame it was! Disco got dropped quicker than the recipient of a Dale Hunter crosscheck so lets not go into some kind of quasi-intellectual debate on how "ohhh disco was once this untouched, pure, gemstone......UNTIL IT BECAME MAINSTREAM." Dance music has always been mainstream. Disco was just a subgenre of it that got extremely over the top and that is what it was meant for. There was never integrity in disco music. The only good thing that came out of disco aside from it completely imploding was the fact that people like Michael Jackson looked at it afterwards and thought "shit, disco could have been cool if it wasn't so fucking thoughtless and stupid, I'm going to fix it."

Lethal Weapon taught us that suicide is funny.

For you film buffs out there, I stumbled upon a site that has some interesting shit on it. Movie scripts that didn't quite make it for whatever reason (a lot of times because studio executives are dumbasses) are always interesting to take a look at and Maddogmovies.com has a section devoted entirely to that sort of thing. There is always the chance that these could maybe, possibly be fake scripts but hey, any idea about a third Predator movie is fine with me, fake or not.

Here are some highlights.

Robert Rodriguez's idea for Predator 3 that never got the green light. This is what he had to say about it.
"...And it was really a cool script, it's floating around somewhere. But it's huge, and will never be made, the studio edited it and said there's no way we can make this, this would cost -- even at that time -- 150 million, and no women would ever go see this movie."

The Thing Part 2 synopsis

A theatrical version of Stephen King's The Stand. This would be really cool to see, especially after how lame the made-for-tv version was. Just about every Stephen King book has become a movie, why not this one? It's by far his best work.

Star Wars (Revision 1)
Star Wars (Revision 2)
A Synopsis of the first draft of Star Wars for those who don't want to read the whole script.

Just to let you know, the Star Wars synopsis is a pretty funny read and I'm really glad that George Lucas revised it.

Actually boy, a woman is more like a beer.

There are still plenty facets of our society that women are largely absent from. I really don't know what to chalk it up to, but I'll leave all that abstract thought for womens studies majors and sociologists. In the meantime I have constructed a short list of areas where I would like to see more participation from women.

Garbagemen
I really think there need to be more women challenging their mind, body and soul in the ever growing waste disposal industry. Sure, there might be a few women here and there working as secretarys in the corporate offices, but thats not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about women conducting fieldwork with their male counterparts, slugging it out in dumpsters, landfills and porta-johns. I think if I woke up in the morning to get the paper and saw a woman garbage collector hopping out of a garbage truck I'd probably give her a high five and ask her out on a date. Plenty of men go out and do girly things all the time. I see male nurses and dudes wearing girls pants everyday and I've even seen a few men cry, so there is no excuse as to why they get to sit around not engaging in man business.

Rape
Yup, women need to get out there and start raping dudes. It's funny how everyone gets in a tizzy when some hot schoolteacher decides she wants to bang a ten year old. That shit is fucking weak sauce. If women had any balls they would be sodomizing those kids with huge rubber dildos, not making love to them in the backseat of a car after gym class. I don't know any kid who would ever complain about that, the lovemaking that is...not the dildo part. On top of that, the fact that women haven't contributed much to the "rape" scene really makes us men look pretty damn bad. When people think of rape, they think of some roided out, frat guy, Vin Diesel looking dude taking advantage of a chick to impress his drunk buddies.

This stereotype should be shared between both genders equally. I'm tired of being seen as a dominating force holding back the womens movement. Women need to start sharing some of the rape responsibility instead of leaving it up to guys like me. I've never raped anyone before, but it can't be all that hard. In todays super technological society you can just drop a pill in somebodys drink and have your way with them. You don't need to dress in all black and corner a defenseless person in a parking garage anymore, nope, it's a different ballgame now. With that said, the playing field has been leveled for women to start raping dudes with a higher success rate, and there is no excuse for the statistics to stay male slanted anymore.

Farting
When was the last time you were on a date with a hot chick and you ended up having to hold in a fart the whole time? This happens all too often because farting in front of a girl on the first date makes you look pretty unsophisticated. Well, if more women were farting on the first date, it would take some of the pressure off of us. It's no secret that women don't fart very often, at least, not in the types of situations that guys do. I'm sure if you walked into a womans bathroom during the office lunchbreak and recorded what was going on in there, you'd hear some pretty outlandish shit that could probably be used as sound effects for the next Eli Roth horror flick.
There is one problem though, most men aren't brave enough to do something like that because it would melt our brain. Ya see, the male species is largely in denial about women farting and pooping. This is why women need to start blasting ass regularly, instead of being so uptight about it. It would be scary at first, but eventually we would get used to it, and it would get rid of all the awkward squirming we go through on dates. Women, if you ever see a dude sitting at a table across from you sweating profusely with a "General Patton-esque warface" on, it isn't because the dinner sucks, its because hes trying to hold in a fart. And ladies, it's all for you.

Video Games
Women need to start playing more video games, not so they can get good at them, but so they stop asking us retarded fucking questions about what is going on. Has anyone ever played a video game with a group of girls in the room? It's like being the teacher during an 8th grade sex ed class, only instead of getting asked where the penis goes and if blowjobs cause pregnancy it's stuff like: Ya so why can that dude fly? Why aren't you dying, you've been shot like 10 times? I'm not saying all women do this, but I've definitely had similiar experiences.

Whoever wrote this headline just wasn't thinking

"Killer Wasps Menace State Department."

It's been happening for years kids. Just for the record, the medieval looking dude who isn't George Washington is King George III.





The definition of a WASP.

Great Movie Gunfights part 1.

To be blunt, action movies suck nowadays. Just look at what they did with the new Die Hard movie for example. No movie featuring Bruce Willis blowing shit up should ever be PG-13. At any rate, there was a time in cinematic history when action movies weren't made with "the family" in mind and it is my aim to focus on cinema that presents blood and carnage in the manner it was supposed to be shown in.
Asian cinema is always way more over the top because, well, people in America are pansys. The first clip I have decided to link is the final battle scene from John Woo's The Killer. It is in no way a cinematic masterpiece, but John Woo's style for filming gun battles has yet to be matched. He was definitely ahead of his time, Chow Yun Fat is great in this film as well, and it's pretty much one of the greatest action movies ever. Those of you who are into people getting blasted into oblivion might want to check this out, otherwise there is always that copy of Finding Nemo floating around. This scene is fifteen minutes of Chow Yun Fat being badass and what is even more amazing is the fact that John Woo and Chow Yun Fat actually manage to top this scene in their final Hong Kong collaboration Hard Boiled. I suggest watching this in full screen mode, with the volume cranked up.

The Truth Hurts

I couldn't have said it any better myself, though in my defense I have made this argument plenty of times. It's nice to have visual evidence though.


Photo Copyright - Some dude who is obviously more pissed off about this than me.

I think I'll hop on the bandwagon on this one.

The new Against Me record is making it's mark, and everyone seems to be talking about it. For the sake of saying something completely obvious, here is my take on it.

Does anyone remember the much hyped and ultimately doomed New Coke ad campaign? I have a vague recollection as I was still a young lad when New Coke came out. If you look to the left, you'll see one of the ads. Notice how the people who designed this ad really thought it was something special. They even went as far as saying the following about it: "It's smoother, uh, uh, yet, uh, rounder yet, uh, bolder ... it has a more harmonious flavor."

Needless to say, nobody bought that shit and the New Coke project failed after a few years. People are essentially saying the same things about the new Against Me record and quite frankly, none of them are even remotely true.


Smoother? Well yes, hiring a guys like Butch Vig to produce your record and Rich Costey to do the mixing will do that.

Rounder? yet, uh, Bolder? If you want to apply this hyperbolic statement to the lyrical content one could say that maybe it is a lot rounder. Gone are the witty sociopolitical statements of the bands past...for the most part. Many of the lyrics deal with more personal topics and while being introspective isn't a bad thing, it gets pretty annoying to listen to a bunch of grown men bitch about the music industry when they have jumped feet first into the fire with cinderblocks tied to their feet. If they feel so dissilusioned with the place they are in, maybe they should have stayed indie. The lyrics that don't involve Tom being a bitchy hypocrite are pretty dumbed down and really reek of a band making a vain attempt at pandering to the wasteland that is the modern rock scene.

It has a more harmonious flavor. Don't get me wrong, this record is pretty catchy, but at what price?

I'm not going to sit here and complain about a punk rock band signing to a major and all that nonsense, because it's pretty childish, and it has become quite obvious that Against Me! abandoned that kind of stuff a long time ago. Need proof? Take a gander at their 18 dollar t-shirts some fateful evening. With that frame of mind intact and after looking at this album objectively, these guys have completely abandoned many of the qualities that made them stand out and thats the bottom line. If thats what these guys want to do, then that is fine, but that doesn't mean I have to hail it as some kind of magical project just because they got a bigger recording budget this time around.

Oh ya, and the song "Stop" is the worst song the band has ever written.

"Thrash Unreal" however is one of the best songs the band has written.

I loved you in Wall Street!

After seeing a rerun of Family Guy the other night in which Peter goes on a 5 minute rant about why The Godfather sucks, I was prompted to re-evaluate a movie that pretty much everyone I know thinks is a masterpiece. I wrote an essay on Platoon for my English class last semester and somehow I managed to lose it, which is why I'm not going to post the whole thing. However, I can still summarize my feelings on the movie and why I refuse to crown it as the masterpiece of wartime commentary that a lot of people seem to think it is. For the essay I wrote, I was asked to compare fantasy and reality, and write about which one I thought was "better." I wasn't asked to do it in those words, but that was essentially the theme. I decided to write about the movie Platoon because it is a fantasy film that has a foundation built on probably the most polarizing and painful conflict in our nations history aside from whoever spent the day arguing about whether to cancel or keep The Chevy Chase show on the air.

Many people aren't aware of the fact that Oliver Stone (the films director for those who by some kind of complete fluke didn’t know) was a Vietnam Vet and supposedly a lot of what Platoon's screenplay was based on, dealt with things he experienced during his tour of duty. Oliver was even wounded twice in battle, so there is no doubt in my mind that he is a credible storyteller for this kind of topic. Before I go into the movie itself, I have to explain further what I meant by my comment about the movie being a fantasy. All of the characters and events are fictional, and pretty much the only thing in the movie that isn't fiction is the historical backdrop. That’s ok, because a war movie doesn't have to be like Band Of Brothers to have a point. That aspect of the fantasy I can support 100 percent, but it is other aspects of it that I can't.

With Platoon, Oliver Stone was trying to portray the psychological effects that war has on the average combat soldier. It also depicted the many inner conflicts prevalent among groups of soldiers as well. There were soldiers who were completely apathetic to what we (we as in The United States) were doing over there, and there were also soldiers who supported the war and believed that we were there with good intentions. There were also soldiers who believed so much in what we were doing that they were willing to do whatever it took to end the war, even if it involved committing war atrocities. Those are prevailing conflicts among soldiers in probably every war, but obviously the massive upheaval surrounding The Vietnam War concerned whether or not we should even be there in the first place (another prevailing theme found in any sort of modern conflict.) Platoon is very successful in how it deals with many of the inner struggles Vietnam soldiers faced on a daily basis but where Oliver Stone ultimately fucks up is the "hollywood, ultra-dramatic" parts he throws into the movie, specifically the scene where the soldiers burn down a Vietnamese village.

Also, Willem Dafoe's monologue about how "America has been kicking everyone's ass for so long, it's about time we got ours kicked" is total bullshit. During the Tet Offensive in 1968 we essentially wiped out the entire Vietcong Army. I wouldn't exactly call that getting our asses kicked if you want to crunch numbers and look at casualty rates on both sides. The fact that we threw superior firepower at them for 16 years and they managed to outlast us tells a lot more about the human spirit than a mere 10 second speech on asskicking can demonstrate, and it shouldn't have been dumbed down.

In every war there are atrocities committed by both sides and it appeared that Oliver Stone was attempting to create something similar to the My Lai Massacre with that aforementioned village scene. Good for him, but I have a few problems with that. The amount of U.S. Soldiers that engaged in that kind of behavior was definitely the minority, so if Oliver Stone was attempting to create a movie about average soldiers, why would he put in a scene of that nature? Merely for shock value, that’s why. Granted, the men who were involved with that incident were probably just average soldiers who snapped, and what they did definitely wasn't right, but if Oliver Stone wanted to make a movie that just focused on war atrocities (though one could argue that the whole war itself was an atrocity committed by The United States) then he should have made a movie specifically about those types of things. Oliver Stone took the entire war and meshed all those different kinds of incidents into one whole movie and marketed it as an example of how every single Vietnam Vet's experience was.

I personally think that the day to day struggles of the average combat soldier and the guys that went bezerk and killed innocent civilians are two separate stories that should be told that way. There is a lot to learn from everything that happened in Vietnam, but putting everything in a 2 hour blender and passing it off as “the real Vietnam” is just shortsighted and irresponsible. Platoon ultimately makes Vietnam Vets look like heartless barbarians (which is pretty popular to do, when was the last time you saw World War II vets portrayed as animals?) and as a fellow Vietnam Vet, Stone should have been more responsible in how he portrayed the good men. I'm sure one of the points he was making could have been the fact that in every single Platoon there were good and bad men but he didn't even really make that obvious to the average moviegoer. He showed one side of it, and thats the side that is supposed to represent the majority, according to his film.

When people see a movie about a topic like Vietnam, they will just assume it is real because most people haven't done a single shred of research regarding what went on over there and that is why I think Platoon is hailed as the masterpiece it is. I’m sure there were people leaving the movie theater after seeing Platoon saying to themselves “wow, every soldier must have had to deal with that kind of thing.” It's not even remotely true. My hometown had a lot of Vietnam vets and I have definitely talked to combat soldiers who didn’t burn any villages down or rape young Vietnames e children (as stones village scene depicts.) Not every war story has to be about heroic Americans who defeat evildoers, but if you’re going to tell a story about that kind of subject matter, tell it right, and be specific.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to sound like a nationalist. I don't think we should have been over there in the first place, but I do think we owe a certain amount of respect to a lot of the guys who got sucked into going over there. So many of them were drafted against their will and when they came home they were treated like garbage as a result of the mainstream media turning on the war and Americans being completely ignorant in general. People like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara should have been the ones getting spit on, not the guys who were sent there by our government officials. There are those who will continue to watch Platoon for entertainment purposes, and taken with a grain of salt, it can be an entertaining two hours especially the part where Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger duke it out, but if you actually think it is a true to life representation of how the average combat soldier interacted with that environment then you really have to be careful regarding which parts you take seriously.

For Glassjaw April Fools comes everyday

There is a joke in The Simpsons where Moe The Bartender tells Barney that he had to send Barney's beer tab to NASA because it was so high that only one of NASA's super nerds would be able to calculate it. The number NASA sends back to Moe is 14 billion dollars If I remember correctly. Visibly disturbed, Barney gives Moe 2000 dollars and the scene ends with moe saying "well, thats halfway there." Needless to say Glassjaw has racked up quite a number of canceled shows and as of today they canceled another one in San Diego. It might not be long before people start to lose count and the number of shows canceled by Glassjaw might need to be calculated by the good people over at NASA. Seriously....why does this band even book shows? Between Glassjaw and Head Automatica Daryl could be coming relatively close to Axl Rose in the "flakiest frontman" category. Granted, Daryl does have a medical condition but I'm beginning to grow rather skeptical that it's the reason for everything that seems to go awry with his bands. Glassjaw should just find a group of dudes who look similar to them and send them out on stage when they don't feel like playing. Kids have turned those guys into borderline gods, and there is no doubt in my mind that the majority of them wouldn't even care if they watched a live set of Glassjaw songs played by Glassjaw lookalikes.